Contentious EU Summit Ends With Pact on Voting and Power-Sharing

After five days of intense diplomatic arm-twisting, European Union leaders early today concluded a sweeping treaty reforming their voting practices and power-sharing that will allow the alliance to expand to include an additional dozen members in the next decade.

The reforms agreed to in Nice, France, at the longest summit of the 15 member states redistribute votes to recognize the relative weight of the biggest countries and ease what has been a major impediment to efficiency--the traditional requirement that all decisions of the bloc be unanimous.

At the urging of Germany, the EU’s most populous country with 82 million citizens, the alliance accorded more voting clout to the four biggest states to ease their concerns that an expanded bloc could result in smaller countries ganging up on the traditional powerhouses.

“This is a big day for Europe,” said Swedish Prime Minister Goran Persson, whose country now takes over the bloc’s rotating presidency from France. “We are ready for enlargement.”

French President Jacques Chirac, the summit’s host, hailed the agreement as a milestone in alliance history. But even at a news conference to trumpet the results of the marathon, 18-hour final session, there was an undertone of disappointment that the accomplishments fell short of expectations.

“I am sorry we didn’t achieve more,” European Commission President Romano Prodi told journalists. “The commission’s expectations had been set high, so there is a little disappointment in our minds.”

The Brussels-based commission had been pushing for qualified majority voting on a wider array of issues, although some larger countries--Britain, in particular--insisted on retaining national control over taxation, social security and immigration issues.

But paramount among the Nice accomplishments, Prodi noted, was the revamping of voting power that will streamline decision-making and allow the bloc to embrace new members, mostly from Eastern Europe, without further slowing its ability to act.

“We have secured a little bit more room for the most populous countries,” Chirac said in his summary of the treaty signed by the 15 leaders just before dawn. “I consider this a basic requirement of democracy, that at least to a degree the voting structure take into account the population of the countries.”

France scored a symbolic victory in staving off Berlin’s push for a bigger number of votes than the other members by virtue of Germany’s having in excess of 20 million people more than the next three largest states. But German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder did manage to commit the alliance to another round of internal reforms at a special conference to be held in 2004. That meeting is expected to more clearly define relations between the member states and Brussels.

Although the summit leaders heralded their accord as a breakthrough that will ensure smooth expansion as early as 2003, the reforms still face tough ratification votes in the member countries. Some of Germany’s 16 states had been particularly resistant to ceding powers to a strengthened central administration and had threatened to veto the Nice treaty if this country’s size and economic clout were ignored in the vote distribution.

But the power-sharing formula initially proposed by Chirac so angered the smaller countries that some threatened to walk out of the summit until the votes were reapportioned. It was the behind-the-scenes scrapping over each of those votes that caused the summit to drag on for five days. In the end, the alliance decided that Germany, Britain, France and Italy will have 29 votes each in the EU’s policy-setting council. Spain was given 27 votes, the Netherlands 13 and Greece, Belgium and Portugal were each given 12. Sweden and Austria ended with 10 votes, Denmark, Finland and Ireland with seven and Luxembourg, four.

Votes for candidate countries--Poland, Romania, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Bulgaria, Slovakia, Lithuania, Latvia, Slovenia, Estonia, Cyprus and Malta--vary from 27 for Poland down to three for tiny Malta.